By Filipa A. Ioannou, San Francisco Chronicle

Criminal sentencing reform and an extension on tax increases for high earners are among California’s November ballot propositions supported by a majority of likely voters, a Field Poll found.

Proposition 56, a $2-per-pack tax on cigarettes, was also leading among the poll’s respondents, though by narrower margins. Fifty-three percent of respondents favored the tax, 40 percent were opposed and 7 percent remained undecided.

In several past elections, tobacco tax initiatives have performed competitively in polling only to fail on election day. In 2012, a $1 cigarette tax to fund cancer research was defeated by a margin of only 0.4 percentage points. In 2006, a proposed tax increase prompted $66 million in tobacco industry spending, and the measure failed.

Prop. 56 would redirect the revenue from the cigarette tax — estimated between $1 billion and $1.4 billion — to health care for low-income Californians. Smoking-related illnesses are costly to the state; a 2015 analysis from the California Health Care Foundation found that among Medicare patients, lung cancer was the deadliest and costliest to treat of the four most common cancers.

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